National Review: GOP Must Renounce #QAnon Nutbag

From the editors of the conservative National Review:

On Tuesday, Jo Rae Perkins won the Republican nomination for U.S. Senate in Oregon. The Oregon GOP says it will back her candidacy notwithstanding her associations with the “QAnon” movement. That’s a mistake. Perkins is an unreconstructed exponent of a batty and corrosive conspiracy theory running a longshot campaign that carries only political downside for Republicans. They should do what they can to distance themselves from her candidacy.

QAnon indulges old pathologies that the Right has over the years struggled to beat back. Obviously, the president, who has been too friendly toward QAnon proponents and himself is inclined to conspiracy theories, isn’t going to police these boundaries (or honor them himself).

But Oregon’s state party can reverse course and decline to put resources into Perkins’s campaign. Republican officeholders in the state can distance themselves from her candidacy. The National Republican Senatorial Committee was never going to spend money in Oregon, but it, too, can speak forthrightly about Perkins’s lunacy. Continuing to associate with Jo Rae Perkins would be a political error and more importantly a moral error — and an entirely avoidable one.